Does truth move?

Most of you know this, but I was raised in a conservative Christian church. I was taught from an early age what the Truth was, that it never changes, and that we should always follow it. This resulted in a teenage version of myself that was VERY SURE about nearly everything in life - I was sure about what was right and what was wrong; I was sure about what I was going to be when I grew up (a missionary); I was even sure about who I was going to marry (my pastor's son). I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what my life was going to look like - after all, I knew the Truth, and that was never wrong.

Well, it doesn't take much looking around in my life to see that NONE of the above came true. In fact, as each of these things crumbled in front of my eyes (my relationship with the pastor's son, my ambitions to be a missionary, even the church itself), I found myself having to reassess what I believed. After all, everything I had been SO SURE of had just disappeared, and I had no idea what to do with all of it. I didn't have a category in my mind for "When Everything Falls Apart."

I watched the church slowly disintegrate when the pastor quit under the spiritual guidance of a popular conservative speaker (and I now know cult leader by every definition of the word) who told the pastor that no man who has ever had a divorce is fit to lead a church. So, the pastor resigned. Chaos ensued...and I was intimately involved with it all as I had been selected to be on the New Pastor Search Committee as the voice of the younger church members (I was a sophomore in college at the time...19 years old). I watched icons of my church world (older members who I'd revered) become bickering, back-talking, insulting, sarcastic children in these meetings. All of the sudden, I realized that it wasn't about truth...it was about whatever they wanted. And I was broken-hearted, furious, and confused.

I won't go into all the details of that time period. Rather, I'd like to jump to the present. That pastor who had resigned and left so much pain in his wake, has taken on the position of pastor of another church in the same area. Apparently, what was true so many years ago (that he was disqualified as a pastor because of a divorce in his past before he became a Christian) is no longer true. Apparently, truth has shifted. It moved.

If that idea can be classified as "once-was-true-but-isn't-anymore," what else about what the pastor said is the same way? If that truth can move, what else could?

Take that line of thinking very far at all, and you can see how it leads to a crisis of faith. I guess the past decade and a half has been something of that crisis, not in the sense that I'm weeping in a dark corner of my room, but in the sense that I doubt, question, and try to reason through everything I that I take as Truth. And I'm actually getting to be okay with that! I realize that God made me this way - questioning, thinking, reasoning, not just accepting. Well, at least I'm not just accepting anything anymore. It doesn't mean I don't have faith....and it doesn't mean that I have to explain everything. But I'm certainly never again going to be like the teenage version of myself that soaked up everything I was told to be. Nope. Nope. Nope.

I think. I wrestle. I doubt. I pray. It's not easy. It's much easier living in a world of stark blacks and whites, but that's not reality much of the time. And so, I keep wrestling.

And God loves me anyway. :)